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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for two more decades in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to make that questionable Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and taking place around 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance